"December 3, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
15 
Life and Letters oy J. C Squire 
The Intimate Essayist 
THE English essay, though nobody takes much 
pubhc notice of it, thrives in this age. And the 
essay of this age is not quite the same as the 
essay of any other age. Men who write theses 
in order to get doctorates of literature might 
find a subject to suit them in what may be called the economic 
basis of the English essay in the various stages of its develop- 
ment. The customary length — and the amount of space 
available for a man largely conditions lus method and even 
affects his choice of themes — of our essays has been deter- 
mined by factors beyond the essayists' control. The first 
great English essayists. Bacon and Cowley, were free ; they 
wrote for themselves, and not for the papers ; and Bacon 
was able to be as short and Cowley as long as they cared to be. 
But the essayists of the Queen Anne and Georgian periods 
had papers of the Spectator type in view ; the early and mid- 
Victorian essayists found their fnarket in monthlies and 
quarterlies which allowed them, if they chose, to run to a 
good many thousands of words ; and the essayists of our 
own day find themselves guided by "economic forces" to 
the literary weeklies and the dailies. If a man writes for a 
weekly his essays will be about two thousand words in length ; 
if for a daily, eighteen hundred or less ; when some of the 
newspapers brought the content of their column down to 
twelve hundred words the essay and the essayists still proved 
adaptable ; and the excellent work done under these severe 
limitations proves that, although it is better that a man 
should choose "canvases" of precisely the size that suits 
him, and not be asked to "pad to fill," or to consent to con- 
finement in a bed of Procrustes, these restrictions imposed 
from without do not mean the death of art or of spontaneity. 
As a matter of fact, the influence of habit is so strong that 
when a man has been for some time writing to " fill " a certain, 
space he finds that his mind grows accustomed to working to 
that length, and that time after time, without conscious 
effort, he will find that he says just what he wants to say, 
and comes to a natural close after having written exactly the 
accustomed amount. 
A period, which has enjoyed Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Belloc, 
Mr. Lucas, Mr. Street, Mr. Lynd, in papers and in collected 
papers has no reason to complain that the essay died with 
Stevenson. Their latest serious rival is the well-known 
political journalist who prefers, as essayist, to half-conceal 
his identity under the elaborate pseudonym "Alpha of the 
Plough." I have just been reading his last (very well illus- 
trated) collection. Leaves in the Wind (Dent, 5s. 6d. net), 
and enjoyed it. .All human labours are imperfect, and there 
are obvious faults in these essays. Like so many modern 
essays, they were originally written to fill a newspapjer column, 
and one feels that Alpha's usual column does not quite suit 
his genius ; it is rather too short to allow him to say as much 
as he might and as, in exceptional cases, he does. They are 
produced at frequent intervals ; sometimes I suspect, and 
(as a journalist) am entitled to presume, in a hurry ; and 
their author has not given his phraseology all the revision 
that it would have stood. His minor weaknesses include a 
lack of care in the concoction of spoof names with flavour in 
them ; his imaginary characters usually bear names of the 
"Spiffkins" order, or tamely suffer the by-this-time tiresome 
series of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. But I think that as 
soon as one has forgotten his essays one will be able to read 
them a second time with undiminished ease ; and then a 
third, and then a fourth time ; and when one finds things 
as attractive as that, one need not bother to complain that 
they are not quite among the masterpieces of the art. In 
other words, "Alpha" has some of the essayists' most impor- 
tant qualities in a very high degree. 
He has a very wide field of literary and historical reference : 
one never knows whether the next illustration will be drawn 
from the career of Alexander the Great or from that of Mr, 
Bottomley. Both his knowledge of books and his memory 
are unusually great ; his powers of quotation alone are 
sufficient to carry liis essays through. He always seems to 
know the funniest story about anything. When he writes 
about early rising, he caps his series of historical instances 
with the case of Bishop Selwyn who put the duty of lying in 
bed on a moral plane. "I did once rise so early," he said, 
"but I felt so vain all the morning and so sleepy all the 
afternoon that I determined not to do it again." He stayed 
in bed after that to keep himself from getting conceited. 
And another of his stories illustrates, though not deliberately, 
his own prime merit. Foote, the actor, told it. " I went 
into a public-house," he said, "and heard one man call for 
spme rum because he was hot, and another call for some rum 
because he was. cold. Then I called for some rum because 
I liked it." 
The salient quality of Foote's remark is a surjrisi'-a 
kind of honesty ; it illustrates the great truths that 
you have only to be candid to be interesting, and that real 
exactitude of statement is one of the rarest things in life"? 
Most men, even when they least know it, play a part to the 
world and to themselves. They must buttress their most 
capricious actions with an entirely supposititious moral 
justification ; they cannot bear reality unclothed. How 
prevalent is the habit of hypocritical speech may be illus- 
trated by a modern analog e of the remarks made by Foote's 
two humbugs, i.e., "Another little drink wouldn't do us any 
harm." As sung on the stage it is ironical ; but it amuses 
chiefly by the way in which it gets home to our weakness. 
Only the bravest or the most abandoned of men would ever 
think of saying "I don't care whether another drink would 
do me any harm or not. I put that disagreeable considera- 
tion out of mind. But I am weak (or greedy, or too lazy 
to stop, or willing mechanically to accompany fellow-drinkers), 
and so I shall have one." But it is often that state of mincl 
which is conventionally veiled by statements about the 
needs of the stomach or the rigours of the cHmate ; and it is 
by dispensing with that conventional veil that the typical 
essayist gets his pecuhar effect and insinuates himself into our 
affections. Montaigne was the great examplar of the i timate 
essayist. He was as frank as Pepys. If a true thing occurred 
to him he set it down : he was content to run the risk of 
exposing his weaknesses to the reprobation or the derision 
of mankind: of appearing vain, or old-maidish, or timid, or 
greedy, or sensual, or cold-blooded, or silly. Lamb played 
whimsically with his own weaknesses, and "Alpha of the 
Plough" is in this regard in the tradition. His little conceits 
and timidities, his day-dreams and indolences, his preten- 
sions, prides, and humiliations are a large part of the raw 
material with which he works— though neither he nor anyone 
else has reached the extreme of remorseless candour that 
was the glory of Montaigne. Still, he does not spare him- 
self ; and the result is that he goes up and not down in our 
esteem. 
****** 
There is an old play — I forget which — wherein it is 
remarked that a man, led on to talk of himself, will always 
give himself away ; and that he will only be saved from 
abysms of shame by the knowledge that his hearers are 
recognising their own frailties in his confessions. That is 
profoundly true. Men may differ in their hold upon prin- 
ciples, in their creeds, in their temperaments, in the strength 
of their wills. But their impulses and their instincts are 
the same. One of the truest sentences ever uttered was : 
"There, but for the grace of God, go I" ; but, though we 
may, most of us, escape the worst deeds and the lowest* 
degradations, there is an immense amount of human experi- 
ence which we all have in common, and with respect to which 
the phrase might be pruned down to "There go I," without 
any quahfication. To test the truth of this, a man has only 
to make the effort, overcome the fear, and confess in any 
company to his castles in Spain, his estimate of his own 
powers and importance, his fears, his prudences, his hum- 
bugs, his compromises, his resolutioris, and his failure to 
live up to them. If it be an honest company he will encounter 
the admi-ssion that his weaknesses are universally shared ; 
if it be not, he will create the sort of awkward silence in 
which tacit and reluctant and shocked admission hangs like 
thunder. The essayist makes his confessions in print ; we 
can recognise ourselves in him when we are reading alone ; 
nobody sees us ; and probably some of the proudest and 
most reserved of men find consolation .^.nd relief in their 
chambers by silently unbosoming themselves to these public 
confessors for the race. 
